Restoring a Fadal Vertical Machining Center

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

Hey guys!
I've been a bit off the radar as of late, thought you guys might enjoy seeing the reason why!

I've been wanting to introduce CNC into my process for quite a while, but wanted to do it 'properly' rather than doing a CNC conversion of a small mill. So I kept my eye on the local classifieds and on Ebay watching for a machining center that I could afford, and even more importantly one that could actually fit into my space!

Most of the inexpensive machining centers for sale are quite large, most of the small ones fetch high prices because guys want them for their garages! I looked at buying something like a HAAS MiniMill new, but the bank didn't want to give me the money, and honestly I think that worked out for the best...

One day on Kijiji I saw someone advertising a 1994 Fadal VMC10 for about $9k. The size and capabilities of the machine were exactly what I was looking for so I decided to email him even though I didn't have that much cash. I got a response 2 white-knuckle days later saying the machine was still available and that he had been authorized to lower the price to $6k (plus HST!). One small snag was that the machine was in Ottawa which is about 450km from where I live in Toronto!

About two weeks after that first email exchange I took the plunge and flew to Ottawa to inspect the machine. I hired a friend of a friend to ferry me about for the day in his car as the machine was located about and hour and a half from the airport. I left my house in Toronto at 6am, was in Ottawa by 9am and looking at the machine by 11am or so.

The machine had been bought in an auction and shipped up from california a few years before, then put in storage and never run as it was surplus to their requirements. The company they bought it off hadn't taken the best care of it and frankly it looked a little rough:

The previous company had run the machine with synthetic coolant, which had functioned as a fairly effective paint stripper. The exposed metal had then gethered a lot of surface rust. However overall there didn't seem to be anything substantially wrong with the machine. The guys selling it lent me a machine operator for the day, he did a demo cut and showed me around the machine.

The machine was changing tools fine, and took a cut quite nicely:

After spending a few hours bumbling around the machine I came to the decision that I should buy it. They were very friendly guys and seemed happy the machine would be going to a good home. They wrapped the whole machine in shrink wrap and said they'd load it onto a truck for me once I got one organized:

The machine came with a coolant tank and 16 toolholders. The toolholders were all pretty rough though and are essentially junk.

The machine is basically exactly the same as a Fadal VMC15, only without the enclosure. The specs are:

XYZ Travels: 20", 16", 20"
Spindle: 7500RPM CAT40, 5HP continuous. 7.5HP Intermittent
Toolchanger: 16 station umbrella toolchanger
Feedrate: 400 Inches Per Minute max
Weight: 4500lbs

The machine only had about 1200 hours of run-time on it since it had been made in 1994 so I had high hopes for condition of the machine overall. More to come on this later...

The control on the machine looks pretty old-school, but is actually fairly full-featured when you dig into it a bit!

To be continued...

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

After the machine was paid for (my credit card is still hurting!) it was time to get it moved to Toronto! The seller loaded it onto a 60' flat-bed trailer, which delivered it to a rigger I'd hired outside of Toronto. A few days later when the weather allowed he drove the machine, along with his forklift, to my shop on his tilt-and-load:

I spent about 5 hours sheoveling snow out of the way to allow the forklift to work safely, and also had to stay outside the shop to prevent people from parking in the loading zone... Needless to say I was pretty sore after shovelling all this!

Jeff showed up with his truck and my precious machine aboard!

Clearing the snow and gritting the ashpalt worked well, we didn't have any trouble with the forklift, other than it was JUST small enough to fit through the doors into my shop.

We had to build a stepped 'ramp' up the entrance of my shop because there's a 1-1/2" step up to the door. We used some MDF sheets that I had lying around. I knew they would fail but I underestimated how energetic it would be! With a 12,000lb forklift and a 4,300lb machine rolling over it the board failed so loudly it sounded like a gunshot! Good thing I have 9" of concrete under my floor!

After a fair bit of shuffling about we got the machine in its final place and set it down.

Note that I had to move literally every single piece of equipment in my shop to get the machine in location. Hopefully it won't have to move for a while!

To be continued...

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

After the machine was in place it was time to start pulling it apart and doing a detailed assessment of the condition of the machine. I want to get it back to as close to 'as new' as my time and budget allowed. And I also need it to be presentable so it could star in my videos. After pulling off the X axis way covers I was a little dicouraged by what I saw... The X axis of the machine had clearly never been greased, and the synthetic coolant had rusted the rails:

Even with the rust the machine had still been running fine when I inspected it. I started to clean all the rust off the machine using soft crimped wire wheels and some green scotchbrite pads.

After cleaning off the active rust there was still some pitting on the rails but it seems fairly mild. Without the active rust acting as an abrasive hopefully the rails will hang in there a little longer if they're treated well. The grease lines for the Y axis were in poor shape, I scraped about a 1/2 gallon of grease away from the lines before I could inspect them:

One of the lines was broken because the hold-down block had suffered from severe galvanic corrosion, the others seem in ok condition. Here's what the hold-down block looked like when I removed it:

Next I started stripping off all the old paint and rust from the machine using a combination of different wire wheels on an angle grinder and on a corded drill, you can see how much of the paint had been damaged off by the coolant:

After stripping the saddle:

Y axis way covers removed, starting to strip the base and clean up the rails and ballscrews:

The front ends of the Y axis rails look horrible, but they're not actually used by the machine:

The machine now looks worse than it did initially as I remove all the covers and work on the rust:

Hitting the stripped areas with an orbital sander makes them look a lot nicer and will also give the primer a nice surface to key into:

Care had to be taken at each step to make sure all dirt/grit/dust was removed from the linear rails and ballscrews as otherwise the grit would destroy them in short order once the machine was back up and running.

With all the paint stripped all I had to do was sand all the surfaces and then I was ready to prime the machine!

You don't want to get all that gunk in your lungs so I basically lived in my respirator while working on the machine:

To be continued...

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

At this point I spent basically a full day cleaning and degreasing the entire machine from top to bottom. All excess grease was removed. All the covers were removed, all the old chips and coolant were scrubbed off. This ensured that no grease would contaminate the machine during painting and the cleaning will help highlight any problem areas on the machine.

The machine then received 2 coats of primer ready for the color-coats, it's starting to look nice again at this point!:

The head and toolchanger covers were cleaned separately along with the way covers. The way covers will be sanded and polished before being re-fitted to the machine.

I love seeing this old logo all cleaned up!

The first color-coat finally went on about 10 days ago. The grey came out a little dark so I had to adjust it later...

I managed to get the grey very close to the original color with some judicious mixing! I also mixed up a light cream that matched the head and toolchanger:

You can see how large the machine is in comparison to my old benchtop mill!

To be continued...

JG Custom Metal Works · Mar 10, 2015

And I thought I had an addiction to buying equipment.

You're a long damn ways from that filing jig my friend. ;D

Awesome machine Aaron, looking foreword to seeing what comes from it.

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

One of the little 'surprises' I found along the way was that one of the X axis trucks had been damaged by the lack of grease and had been shedding bearings:

You can see the end-cap had been blown off, and bearings were being spat out through the gap. Unfortunately with the table on the machine there is no way to remove or replace the end-caps or seals on the trucks, so I had to jerry-rig a repair. I tried clamping the end-cap back in place with a tiny C clamp, but the shape of the end caps made it keep slipping off. In the end I decided to make up a clamp.

First I drilled and tapped a 1/4-20 hole about 1/2" deep in the underside of the table just outboard of the truck:

I then machined up a little slotted clamp from some appropriately shaped scrap that I had lying around. The clamp was snugged to the underside of the table using a 1/4-20 cap screw, and then tapped into place against the end-cap:

Obviously it's not a perfect repair, but it should prevent the truck from shedding bearings while also helping it to retain grease. Hopefully those bearings should limp along for a while before I have to replace them completely.

The next repair task was to make a new grease line for the Y axis bearing trucks:

The copper line was bent by hand and then fitted onto a spare port on the manifold, as the original port was damaged when I tried to re-fit the new line. It's not quite as neat as the original routing, but it should work just fine!

I did some other minor things that weren't documented like replacing power indicators, rewiring the transformer for my building voltage, cleaning rails and ballscrews, checking the condition of the thrust bearings on each axis and so on!

That brings you guys up to date on where I'm at now! There's still a bunch of work to be done. Priorities going forward:

* Clear-coat the machine with a 2 part epoxy to give the paint some chemical resistance
* Replace the fan on the spindle motor
* Run-in the spindle to redistribute the grease after it's sat for so long
* Flush the bearing trucks with new grease and run-in the bearings
* Flush the ballscrews with new grease
* Re-finish and re-fit the way covers
* Commission an enclosure for the machine
* Install a system for tranferring CNC files to the controller
* Clean up the spindle taper
* Stone the table

In the long run there are a couple of bigger things I will have to do as money becomes available:

* Relace the X axis linear rails
* Possibly replace the X axis ballscrew
* Replace the thrust bearings on each axis
* Replace the spindle (the current one has some runout unfortunately)

The machine as it stands will move under its own power right now, and will likely work just fine for my needs for a while. The X-axis rails and the spindle will likely be the first serious problem areas. The spindle will be about $3k to replace, and the X axis rails will be about $1300. All in all, even with the extra costs, it has worked out to be a pretty economical way to get a pretty serious machine into the shop! Buying new would have cost me $75,000 or more!

I also have a bunch of support equipment I have yet to buy so I can actually use the machine:

* Air compressor (likely a 5HP Saylor Beall or Champion compressor)
* CAT 40 toolholders (from Maritool, have bought some initial tooling already)
* CNC Vise (from Orange Vise Co)

I'm making a really strong effort to make sure that all the equipment I buy from now on is made in North America. It's more expensive but I like knowing that it's high quality and being able to talk to the people that made it!

I've been taking a time-lapse video of this whole process, so I'll post that once I'm done! Will keep posting photos as I work on the machine as well.

Once the machine is up and running I'll be spending a chunk of time re-designing the Resolute and getting setup to use CNC to help make them! It's been a fun but exhausting process thus far!

To be continued over the next few weeks guys! I will be posting more videos and photos as I make progress on the machine and as I start working out my new knifemaking process!

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

JG Custom Metal Works said:
And I thought I had an addiction to buying equipment.

You're a long damn ways from that filing jig my friend. ;D

Awesome machine Aaron, looking foreword to seeing what comes from it.

Haha, yeah GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) is a serious problem my friend! At least now I'm able to buy things that serve as a creative outlet rather than mindlessly occupying my time...

I wanted to post this here because CNC stuff gets mentioned from time to time but no-one has really done a thread showing what it takes to get into it... It's basically like building a shop again from scratch because of all the ancillary equipment/software/skills that are needed! I'm lucky in that I was able to get into it 'cheaply', but even so there's an awful lot of expense to deal with. I'm looking forward to actually starting to get some knives out the door so I can pay my credit card down and so on... Hopefully I'll be back up and running by sometime around the middle of the year.

liamstrain · Mar 10, 2015

Fantastic work so far. Looking forward to what you do with it.

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

liamstrain said:
Fantastic work so far. Looking forward to what you do with it.

Thanks mate! I'm looking forward to getting to run the machine! It's a pretty serious piece of kit (despite its age!), should be fun making videos about it!

zhyla · Mar 10, 2015

I've seen old CNC machines for sale around here but have always been nervous about it from a software point of view. I understand how to convert a mill to CNC and run it with LinuxCNC or Mach3 or whatever. What's the software stack look like for these things? I'm guessing you don't just put an STL file on a thumb drive and plug it in

.

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

zhyla said:
I've seen old CNC machines for sale around here but have always been nervous about it from a software point of view. I understand how to convert a mill to CNC and run it with LinuxCNC or Mach3 or whatever. What's the software stack look like for these things? I'm guessing you don't just put an STL file on a thumb drive and plug it in .

Basically you have to make sure that the machine has a serial port (RS232). If it does then the machine can usually be 'drip fed', which means that you install a simple program on a cheap old windows machine and then use that to send your G-code programs to the machine. This has a number of benefits given that the older machines have tiny amounts of storage space (mine has less storage space than ONE floppy disk!).

The overall chain would look like this:
CAD Model (Solidworks or whatever) -> CAM (Solidcam, HSMExpress, etc) -> DNC program (for transferring to the machine) -> serial cable -> CNC machine.

I'm sure you know but just to clarify:
CAD = Computer Aided Design: The program where you draw your parts, the result of this is a CAD file
CAM = Computer Aided Manufacture: The program where you design the toolpaths that will make the parts out of a block of material, the result of this is a G-code file
DNC = Direct Numeric Control: The program for drip-feeding the G-code to the machine via the serial connection

It will likely be a bit of a pain to setup, but should be fairly simple and bullet-proof once it's done. One nice thing about the machine I bought it that they're very common, so parts and support are easy to find.

That should be a primary consideration with any machine you look at. Fadals are probably some of the easiest old machines to maintain/support. Other brands can be difficult or impossible to get parts for and could be quite expensive. Research is key on that front!

Maelstrom78 · Mar 10, 2015

Way to go tackling this project! I look forward to your updates.

HSC /// · Mar 10, 2015

aarongough said:
Basically you have to make sure that the machine has a serial port (RS232). If it does then the machine can usually be 'drip fed', which means that you install a simple program on a cheap old windows machine and then use that to send your G-code programs to the machine. This has a number of benefits given that the older machines have tiny amounts of storage space (mine has less storage space than ONE floppy disk!).

The overall chain would look like this:
CAD Model (Solidworks or whatever) -> CAM (Solidcam, HSMExpress, etc) -> DNC program (for transferring to the machine) -> serial cable -> CNC machine.

I'm sure you know but just to clarify:
CAD = Computer Aided Design: The program where you draw your parts, the result of this is a CAD file
CAM = Computer Aided Manufacture: The program where you design the toolpaths that will make the parts out of a block of material, the result of this is a G-code file
DNC = Direct Numeric Control: The program for drip-feeding the G-code to the machine via the serial connection

It will likely be a bit of a pain to setup, but should be fairly simple and bullet-proof once it's done. One nice thing about the machine I bought it that they're very common, so parts and support are easy to find.

That should be a primary consideration with any machine you look at. Fadals are probably some of the easiest old machines to maintain/support. Other brands can be difficult or impossible to get parts for and could be quite expensive. Research is key on that front!

Aaron, we use Multi-DNC for our shop which feeds 6 CNCs including 4 Fadals, It's from Spectrum Technologies. We bought it 20 yrs ago or something, I'm sure there is something newer on the market.

Also for your service and parts, I think Fives owns Fadal rights now - http://metal-cutting-composites.fivesgroup.com/about-us/about-metal-cutting-composites.html
but there are many independent techs for Fadals

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

Maelstrom78 said:
Way to go tackling this project! I look forward to your updates.

Thanks mate!

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

hsc3_90293 said:
Aaron, we use Multi-DNC for our shop which feeds 6 CNCs including 4 Fadals, It's from Spectrum Technologies. We bought it 20 yrs ago or something, I'm sure there is something newer on the market.

Also for your service and parts, I think Fives owns Fadal rights now - http://metal-cutting-composites.fivesgroup.com/about-us/about-metal-cutting-composites.html
but there are many independent techs for Fadals

Nice mate!

The system I'm looking at is made by Calmotion, it's basically a teeny-tiny computer that gets installed inside the pendant cabinet. One little USB port is exposed on the side of the pendant, and you control the computer by entering commands on the pendant keyboard. Basically makes it like the usb is built into the machine. It emulates the way the old Fadal floppy drives worked. I may use an old PC to get up and running though. Here's the calmotion system: http://calmotion.com/products-page/usbmemorycontrollers/usbcnc-fad-int

I've been using http://fadalcnc.com/ for parts, I have had good experiences so far! http://itscnc.com/ also offers parts/support for Fadals, apparently Dave DeCaussin (The 'D' in 'FADAL') used to work for ITS, not sure if he still does.

12345678910 · Mar 10, 2015

aarongough said:
Nice mate!

The system I'm looking at is made by Calmotion, it's basically a teeny-tiny computer that gets installed inside the pendant cabinet. One little USB port is exposed on the side of the pendant, and you control the computer by entering commands on the pendant keyboard. Basically makes it like the usb is built into the machine. It emulates the way the old Fadal floppy drives worked. I may use an old PC to get up and running though. Here's the calmotion system: http://calmotion.com/products-page/usbmemorycontrollers/usbcnc-fad-int

I've been using http://fadalcnc.com/ for parts, I have had good experiences so far! http://itscnc.com/ also offers parts/support for Fadals, apparently Dave DeCaussin (The 'D' in 'FADAL') used to work for ITS, not sure if he still does.

I'm looking forward to this thread, No detail is too small for me

This thread on WW he instals one of the Calmotions - good for you to have another person you can ask if you run into questions
http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?488951-Mentoring-at-high-school-shop-for-robotics-club/page2

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

12345678910 said:
I'm looking forward to this thread, No detail is too small for me

This thread on WW he instals one of the Calmotions - good for you to have another person you can ask if you run into questions
http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?488951-Mentoring-at-high-school-shop-for-robotics-club/page2

Let me know if you want details on any of the work done so far! I'll happily talk your ear off about it

Thanks for the link to the Calmotion thread! Wish he showed the Matsuura more, those are nice machines!

Frank Niro · Mar 10, 2015

You certainly have proved to be amazing during your go ahead of the knife making and as well to do the photography and writing so others can benefit ! I find this part of your progress even more fascinating perhaps made even more so because of my no knowledge whatsoever on these type machines. Thank you for this too!
Frank

aarongough · Mar 10, 2015

Frank Niro said:
You certainly have proved to be amazing during your go ahead of the knife making and as well to do the photography and writing so others can benefit ! I find this part of your progress even more fascinating perhaps made even more so because of my no knowledge whatsoever on these type machines. Thank you for this too!
Frank

Thanks very much for the kind words Frank! I love sharing this stuff, so much more fun when you can share the journey with others! I'm also very aware that lots of people never get to see a machine like this, much less the guts of one... I find machinery like this amazing, and to think that this machine is 'simple' even when compared to something as commonplace as a modern car! Modern technology is simply amazing in my mind, I hope to never lose my awe of it...

629hugo · Mar 10, 2015

It's hard to tell if those are just plane steel plates for leveling feet or if there is some type of isolation. You might upgrade those feet too to help reduce vibration. It probably wont do much but it should help isolate your from the machine. Are you on the ground floor of that building? Is there concrete slab underneath you or floor joists?